Fawstin on Islam
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Writing in FrontPage Magazine about the need to "call Islam 'Islam'", "recovering Muslim" Bosch Fawstin (via HBL), offers the following bit of clarity in response to some critics:
Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it’s not because of Islam, it’s because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn’t stop some among us from thinking that his choice somehow shines a good light on Islam. It doesn’t. A good Muslim according to us is a bad Muslim according to Islam.I could have used this degree of clarity about a week ago!
The rest of the piece is similarly good, and I consider it required reading on the War We Should Be Fighting But Aren't. On his blog, Fawstin notes that his piece has generated over a thousand comments, and he invites further discussion.
[I]f you disagree, make your counter-argument and let's keep this conversation going until I win, which means we All win.So read the whole thing, and discuss it if you wish.
-- CAV
9 comments:
Via Sam Harris, here's a *really* good post on that topic.
An Atheist Muslim's Perspective on the 'Root Causes' of Islamist Jihadism and the Politics of Islamophobia
In addition to its points regarding "Islamophobia", it's chock full of other good ideas that most commentators, particularly Leftists, evade and/or fail to realize, not the least of which are:
1. Ideas are not People. To attack the former is not necessarily to attack the latter. Since people have free will, while ideas don't, a man can be morally worse - or better -- than his professed ideas.
I know of many Christians who transcend that religion, for example; when offered such people as a "credit" to their religion, I say that they are a credit to themselves *despite* their religion.
Conversely, I've also made that case in the apparently reverse direction: that some Objectivist was an asshole is not necessarily a reflection of the ideas themselves.
The ideas and the person should be evaluated on their own terms; then and only then can you determine how much of a man's actions are a function of his professed ideas, or of his inconsistency with them.
2. "Extremism" of an ideology is not a "distortion" (or "twisting") of an ideology; it is the greatest consistency with the fundamentals of that ideology. Among other things, this is why "extreme left" and "extreme right" are so similar.
Read the whole thing.
Thanks for bringing the Harris piece to my attention, as well as underscoring the fact that people are not the same thing as their professed ideas.
Regarding your point about people taking jerks as representatives of Objectivism, the ready comeback is, "Am I an asshole?"
At minimum, you will at least get such a person to shut up about Objectivism in your presence. I don't know if it always goes beyond that, although if there is an audience to the exchange, it more likely does.
Yo, Gus, you write, 'Regarding your point about people taking jerks as representatives of Objectivism, the ready comeback is, "Am I an asshole?"' Alas, I've run into a few Objectivists on whom that would backfire.
Jim May writes, "Ideas are not People. To attack the former is not necessarily to attack the latter. Since people have free will, while ideas don't, a man can be morally worse - or better -- than his professed ideas."
This reminds me of an interesting poll recently discussed here, in which 38,000 Muslims in 39 countries were interviewed over five years. The takeaway is that the Muslim world's not a monolithic hive mind, and American Muslims appear to be significantly Americanized (though less than one would like) compared to much of the Muslim world. (And not the sort of trend that would continue if the multiculty lefties had their way.)
Mind you, I haven't looked more closely at the poll results, but the broad outlines as reported match my impressions. Some parts of the Islamic world are quite non-observant, especially many parts of Central Asia, and other parts are super hard core, and part of the reason is due to the extent of contact with the non-Islamic world. In Central Asia north of Afghanistan, for example, there was 70 years of Soviet occupation, in Pakistan there was British rule, and so on. (Most important in this respect was the establishment of secular education by the Brits and the Russkies, and in Soviet Central Asia in particular there was an almost complete severance of the traditional teaching of Arabic, for example.) --Though there are also earlier differences within Islam at play: (1) Central Asia was heavily Turkic, and the Turks there were generally much less observant than Arabs, and (2) due to Ottoman rule, Central Asia accepted the most liberal of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, the Hanafi school, which is "liberal" (very relative term there) especially in the sense of being least amenable overall to the pretensions of the ruler.
Whereas, not coincidentally, Afghanistan is an almost unconquerable nut for any outsider--it's revealing that the most peaceful occupation of the country was that of the Mongols, and that mostly because the Mongol rulers were even more bloodthirsty in revenge than the Afghans were (and generally are). Or as Kipling put it in one of his poems mordantly commenting on the lot of the British soldier (who did a bit of fighting in Afghanistan, not always successfully), When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
I'll just add that there are some interesting little twistings in history in the region you don't read so much about. The odd strain of Islamic republicanism ascendant in Iran, for example, was strongly shaped by Russian socialism among laborers in the petroleum industry in Czarist Azerbaijan, especially in Baku, which went along with a significant degree of westernization (with heavy Russian tinge) in Azerbaijan that in some ways makes it comparable to Lebanon. (For example, the first western-style opera in the Islamic world was an Azerbaijani opera, Layli and Majnun, on a poem that's basically the Islamic Romeo and Juliet, written in 1907; Azerbaijani film makers had a reputation for avant garde films under the Soviets; and Azerbaijan has a very interesting jazz scene.)
Snedcat,
Heh! I do have to concede that there are professed Objectivists out there who would reinforce that stereotype by using my line, and maybe even playing the part by reacting to the deserved answer childishly.
Gus
"I do have to concede that there are professed Objectivists out there who would reinforce that stereotype by using my line, and maybe even playing the part by reacting to the deserved answer childishly."
Yeah, I could give a few examples, but the only interesting one would be (oh, this would have been about 25 years ago) the alpha-male-wanna-be doggie-macho self-declared Objectivist studying physics who, when he learned I was also a physics major, started berating me as irrational because I wasn't going into cosmology or elementary particle physics, because "that's where the intellectual rot has really set in from philosophical decay," but also becaused those were the only fields for real physicists to work on. The fact that I found statistical mechanics and thermodynamics more interesting cut no mustard with him. So the question is, did he count as a jerk Objectivist, a jerk physicist, or just a jerk?
And also, it's worth adding that asking "Am I an asshole?" to someone attacking Objectivism is not uniformly successful. I saw one Objectivist ask that in an online discussion of (attack on) Objectivism, and one response was, "No, but that's because you don't actually understand Rand," while another one just said, "Not yet." The basic problem is that many leftist opponents of Objectivism are essentially emotionalists, and they both practice and peddle pure bigotry as a result. "Am I an asshole?" is a good retort against an intellectually honest interlocutor, but it's less useful against a bigot who not only sees you as not fully human but wants everyone else to too. In short: Is the person honestly trying to resolve contradictions in his views, or is he just looking for another club to beat you with?
Heh, I'll add that the worst jerk behavior I can think of that I personally witnessed was at my first linguistics conference. It was largely a conference of field workers in African languages, so heavily devoted to on-going research on unstudied or less studied languages; in physics terms, it would be like a meeting of experimental physicists discussing laboratory techniques. One of the speakers was a high-flyer grad student in theoretical linguistics from MIT itself, and so rabidly, mindlessly Chomskyan--the linguistics equivalent of theoretical cosmology. And mind you, Chomsky constantly insists that the more theoretical an approach is, the more valuable and scientific it is--descriptive work is the minimal first level of true science, and saying certain research is merely "taxonomic" is a well-worn, tried and true insult in Chomsky land. I doubt you'd find many theoretical physicists who would say comparabke things about experimentalists, but then physics takes an empirical view of the nature of knowledge that Chomskyan linguistics denies for knowledge of language.
Anyway, the guy got up and started grandstanding from his first sentence, and what a snooty snotty little chap he was too. I left halfway through because it was just embarrassing; I gather I missed quite an entertaining revolt in the Q&A session in which some of these non-theoretical toilers started giving the guy data off the cuff that he twisted himself in pretzels to fit into the latest theory, with the end result that he showed the theoretical framework he was working in (Optimality Theory) is tautological. (This is a common charge, and an accurate one, but it doesn't faze its practitioners, for it is based on interesting ideas. It is interesting to go through the theory and think about which principles have to be discarded to make it non-tautological, but no one really does so.)
Oh, and a bit of clarification about my last comment, which I should have immediately realized could be misleading. Optimality Theory (OT) was not created by Chomsky, but by two phonologists with Chomskyan bona fides, and it is one possible working out of certain Chomskyan ideas. Many phonologists are gaga about OT, while others are not. (No, that satire's not mine, I just wish it was.)
""Am I an asshole?" is a good retort against an intellectually honest interlocutor, but it's less useful against a bigot who not only sees you as not fully human but wants everyone else to too. In short: Is the person honestly trying to resolve contradictions in his views, or is he just looking for another club to beat you with?
Usually, if they're hurling insults at the get-go, they've already made their minds up. Asking the question can (1) tell you if that is mistaken, (2) tell the person that you know he's dishonest, or (3) let anyone in earshot know to question what such a person is saying.
Unless I see some value in clarifying my own or someone else's thinking by continuing such a conversation, I cut it short on the grounds that it is wasting my time.
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